...using film cells as color reference.


Hello guys.


I just finished this regrade of the UHD 4K. The goal was, of course, to make it look like it did back in the theaters in 1999. For color reference I used a collection of Film cells, although many scenes on the 4K UHD already looked pretty much spot on. Many scenes, but not all.


Important things wrong in the 4K UHD:

- Cyan push/cyan tint. The 4K has an extreme cyan push on some scenes. Way too much saturation that needed to be fixed. Some shots have also a cyan tint like first jump, woman in red, or the rooftop shooting. Based on the cells, those scenes are wrong (actually you don't need film cells to see some scenes are wrong right away...).

- Teal. Yeah, our old friend teal. Many scenes inside the ship are tealized. Not only tealized, but also have a slight blue tint. This has been fixed too.

- Green tint. This is more difficult to see, but it's definitely there. Also fixed.


And of course I did some minor corrections, for color consistency, mainly, also to fix some weird HDR glitches and even to fix a noticeable use of a "power window" for the blue pill...



Why not using the 35mm Version 2 print scan realesed a few years ago as a reference?, you might have wondered. (Gallery -> imgur.com/a/5mTFn)
Here's an interesting comparison between a few sources that speaks for itself:




Well, as you can see, because it looks like crap. Colors are way off.
PERIOD.

Something worth noticing about the film cells is that you can't just match the regrade exactly to what you see on them. There is a red tint, specially noticeable on darker shots, and a handful of them have also wrong whites. But the colors are there. They just need to be balanced before using them as a reference.

Some pics (jpeg): Gallery


















I think people interested in the regrade would be glad to have the Cinema DTS included too. I don't have it, so if someone is kind enough to pm me a link I'll be gladly muxing it.
I'll be realeasing this project within the next few days. It's a SDR release. You can find the tonemapping luts I used on the Star Wars Trilogy Forums. The best one, for the most part of the film, is Lut1.

Just out of curiosity, what's the source of those film cells? Have you verified that they are real? Many film cells out there on ebay etc. are fake and many others are from trailers.

Very intrigued by this, your regrade does seem the truest to form. It's crazy how much they toned down the green hue of the UHD.

(2020-08-31, 02:42 PM)TomArrow Wrote: Just out of curiosity, what's the source of those film cells? Have you verified that they are real? Many film cells out there on ebay etc. are fake and many others are from trailers.

If you ask me if I have a print myself (the only way to be 100 % sure)... the answer, obviously, is no. This is the source for the cells (you can ask the guy): https://www.ebay.ie/itm/Matrix-35mm-Film...4201880499

This looks great. I saw this in the cinema in '99 and possibly my memory is failing me but your regrade looks way more authentic than the recent UHD release.

I have the cinema DTS but it arrived via a 35 mm scan so will most likely have some frames intentionally removed to sync with the print. If that's still useful to you, lemme know.

sanjuro_61,

I have two versions of the Cinema DTS, extracted from regrades I found online. They are in perfect sync with each other and only vary in gain level. Don't know which one is the "original", but I suspect on is normalized and the other is not.

They are synced to the BD, but I think they just need an initial delay to adjust to the UHD. I can get you either of these tracks once I'm home latter today.

IF the film cells are from a release print AND NOT from trailer, it can be noted that DVD was pretty spot on (as I always suspected), hence my regrade was not that wrong (apart its own flaws due to the regrading script I used at the time)...

Hint: to check if cells are from trailers, is it possible to find which trailers were available in the cinemas, and compare cells with trailer frames - if there are some (or all) not matching, it must be from release print, if they all match they are most likely from trailer.

Ok, seems I can't login to kickass anymore...
I have an account on limetorrents, so at least I can upload it somewhere.
Oh, I just registered on demonoid! I applied for uploader. When (if) they allow me to upload torrents I will post it there too.

What's about blutopia? Many of us use that for their projects.